CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, operates the world’s largest particle-physics laboratory and relies on a vast international collaboration of scientists, engineers and administrative experts. Beyond its scientific mission, CERN runs a complex ecosystem of services supporting thousands of users, procurement operations, HR processes, safety systems and the management of large-scale research infrastructure.
At the core of these daily operations is CERN’s Electronic Document Handling (EDH) system, which supports over half a million administrative processes every year — from simple leave requests to highly structured purchasing workflows. Over the decades, EDH has evolved through multiple workflow engines.
This talk outlines the architectural principles, testing framework, and migration strategy that have enabled EDH to evolve reliably while preserving business continuity. It also highlights how the same approach will now support the transition to CIB Seven.
CIB Seven is an open-source, long-term-supported fork of Camunda 7, developed by CIB software GmbH to provide a stable, future-proof BPM engine.
By migrating to CIB Seven, we retain full compatibility with existing Camunda 7 BPMN models, Java delegates and infrastructure. This ensures minimal disruption, license independence and long-term maintainability.
Attendees will gain insight into the architectural design, migration challenges and lessons learned from modernizing a mission-critical system at CERN.
Dmitry Kekelidze is a System Architect and Tech Lead at CERN’s Business Computing group, where he leads the evolution of enterprise systems supporting CERN’s administrative and operational processes. Acting also as a technical Product Owner, he focuses on designing sustainable architectures, guiding large-scale migrations, and modernizing long-standing applications while ensuring reliability and maintainability. His work bridges deep technical expertise with a pragmatic approach to complex system evolution.